First round. Blitz.
Question No. 1.
What did Napoleon give to one actress who, during a conversation, unceremoniously asked Bonaparte for a portrait as a souvenir?
A coin.
The experts responded.
Question No. 2.
Why was a cross engraved on the reverse of a medieval penny?
To make it easier to chop the coin into pieces.
The experts responded.
Question No. 3.
The reverse of the Italian 1 euro coin depicts a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, the Spanish one - King Carlos I, and the German one - an eagle. What is shown on the reverse of a Greek coin?
Owl.
The experts responded. The score is 1-0.
Second round.
The picture shows a heraldic shield with a monogram; the monogram consists of three Latin letters. Whose monogram is this and what does each of the letters mean?
This is the monogram of Peter I. The letters mean "Peter I Emperor".
The experts did not answer. The score is 1-1.
Third round.
While traveling around Britain, Guy de Maupassant often saw the same picture: three or four cows grazing by the road and with them one sheep. As a local resident explained to the writer, why do animals graze in such company?
The ram is the wolf's share.
The experts did not answer. The score is 1-2.
Fourth round.
What is the purpose of this cutlery?
Chicken leg clamp.
The experts did not answer. Score 1-3.
Fifth round. Black box.
The black box contains Tsumayoji. "Tsuma" means "nail" in Japanese; "yo" - "willow"; "ji" - "branch". What's in the black box?
Toothpick.
The experts did not answer. Score 1-4.
Sixth round.
In March 1881, at the exhibition of the Association of Itinerants in St. Petersburg, a painting with two titles was presented. One of them is "Fool". Name a second, more well-known name.
"Alyonushka". The word "fool" was popularly used to describe orphan girls.
The experts did not answer. Score 1-5.
Seventh round.
Recently, a group of American sociologists developed an equation that can be used to calculate the rate of increase in the number of bestsellers purchased. It turned out that a similar equation has been known for a long time, although it is used in a different area of human activity. What is calculated by the same equation?
Spread of epidemics.
The experts responded. Score 2-5.
Eighth round.
This sport was born thanks to fans of another sport - amateurs who, while waiting for good weather, smoked cigars and enjoyed good champagne. What sport was born at the end of the 19th century and how did it happen (at your disposal is a bottle of champagne, glasses and a box of cigars)?
Table tennis. The bottle cap replaced the ball, and the cigar boxes replaced the rackets.
The experts responded. Score 3-5.
Ninth round.
The object you see in the picture is called a gyrk, in Russian - dublo. In the life of a peasant family, one such item was enough. What was it used for?
They put a small child there who could not walk yet.
The experts responded. Score 4-5.
Tenth round.
One day, Lloyd Osborn was painting in the yard at an easel. What was the name of his stepfather, who, observing this, out of idleness, drew a map and put unusual names on it?
Eleventh round. 13th sector.
P P
B B
C C
What do these letters mean and which one is missing?
Days of the week. "H" is missing.
The experts responded. The score is 6-5.
The experts were able to come back from a score of 1-5. They took a minute on credit for the question about bestsellers, but they were able to answer the question about Stevenson ahead of schedule. From the faces of the experts after the game one could understand that they themselves did not understand how this happened. It turned out to be a very interesting game.
The classic 14-15 puzzle is a square box containing 15 square tiles. The tiles are numbered from 1 to 15. The box can hold 16 tiles (4 horizontally and 4 vertically), but instead of a tile numbered 16 there is an empty space. Due to this free space, the tiles can move freely. The last two tiles with numbers 14 and 15 are swapped. It is required, without removing any tiles from the box, to move them so that the numbers are in order and the empty square is in the lower right corner. The general view of this puzzle is shown in the figure.
The authorship of this puzzle is often attributed to Sam Loyd. In 1891, Loyd offered a $1,000 prize for correctly solving the puzzle. Tens of hundreds of people swore that they had solved the problem, but not one could remember the moves to write them down and receive a bonus for it. By assigning the prize, Loyd did not risk anything, because the problem he proposed was insoluble. Of the more than 20 billion possible arrangements of squares, exactly half of the combinations can be obtained by moving squares from the initial arrangement. The remaining arrangements of squares, including the one that needs to be found, if we use the terminology of the theory of permutations, have a different “parity,” and permutations with different parities do not transform into each other when moving the squares inside the box.
From 1891 until his death, Samuel Loyd believed that he had invented the puzzle. However, in 2006, in their new book, The 15 Puzzle, Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld prove that Sam Loyd did not invent this puzzle, but made his contemporaries and subsequent generations believe it.
By painstakingly sifting through thousands of period newspapers in the United States and Europe, the authors uncovered the true origins of the puzzle. The real inventor of the puzzle was Noah Palmer Chapman, a postmaster from Canastota, who, back in 1874, showed friends a puzzle consisting of sixteen numbered squares that had to be placed in rows of four so that the sum of the numbers in each row was equal to 34. Then the son Noah Chapman, Frank Chapman brought the modified puzzles to Syracuse, New York, and then to Hartford, Connecticut, where students at the American School for the Hearing Impaired began production of the puzzle. By 1879, it was already sold not only in Hartford, but also in Boston. Then wood artist Matthias Reis learned about the “tags”. In December 1879, he started a business producing a new puzzle called the Gem Puzzle. In early 1880, a certain Charles Pevey, a dentist from Worcester, attracted public attention by offering a monetary reward for solving the puzzle, which added to the popularity of the new game. The game reached Europe in the spring of that year.
On February 21, 1880, Noah Chapman tried to apply for a patent for his invention (the patent was called “Diamond Block Puzzle”, “Block Solitaire Puzzle”), but the patent application was rejected, since it differed little from the “Tricky Blocks” patent already issued three years earlier "(English: "Puzzle-Blocks").
Since the classic version of the puzzle - swapping the places of tiles with numbers 14 and 15 - has no solution, over time the goal of the puzzle has changed slightly - you need to place all the tiles with numbers from 1 to 15 in their places from some position in which all or part tiles are not in their proper places. You can play a similar version of "Tag"online .
Since the invention of "Tag", this puzzle has had all sorts of variations. Instead of the standard set of tiles with numbers from 1 to 15 and placed in a 4x4 box, there are puzzles with a different number of tiles and sizes:
Sometimes letters are used instead of numbers, then the goal of the puzzle is to collect a certain phrase, a set of words:
Often, instead of numbers, pictures are applied to the tiles; the goal of the puzzle is to collect the picture in its entirety:
There are three-dimensional puzzles, but all the tiles are still in the same plane:
In addition to simply collecting a picture, sometimes it is necessary to complete a certain task:
Pit Stop Puzzle
It is necessary to move the tiles so as to “change” the wheels of the car
Puzzle "Spider's Web"
It is necessary to move the tiles so that the spider is in the center of the web
Hole 19 Puzzle
You need to move the tiles to hit the golf ball.
Wind rose puzzle (Oost West puzzel)
It is necessary to move the tiles so that all cardinal directions fall into place
Puzzle "Proton"
It is necessary to move the tiles so as to connect all the protons with one bond
Puzzle “Olympic sports” (Olympic Sports)
The tiles have through holes in the shape of Olympic sports. The same sports are depicted on the inside of the box. All sports need to be compared
Puzzle "Calendar"
On the left you can set the year and month, but you have to move the numbers relative to the days of the week yourself to create a calendar
Puzzle "Super Solitaire"
You need to move the tiles to get certain card combinations
In this article we will look at the most interesting puzzles intended for children, but not every adult can master them. They managed to stupefy more than one Internet user and gained enormous popularity on the Internet, as did comic tests with answers - but how quickly can you cope with them? The correct answers are waiting for you at the end of the article!
Where does the bus go?
If we talk about the most popular children's tasks on the Internet, this is one of them. Here is a picture of a bus. Which way is he heading?
How many points are there?
More attentiveness tasks for the most eagle-eyed users: how many black dots do you see at the intersections of lines?
Which circle is bigger?
Now let's solve interesting graphic puzzles. Can you answer which of the yellow circles shown in the picture is larger?
Moving the matches
The following children's puzzles are also often given to first-graders to solve: they require you to move matches in a certain way to get a given figure.
Find the panda!
The Internet was also blown up by the following graphic puzzles by artists who placed an image of a panda in complex pictures and invited other users to find it. They hid the panda among a crowd of Star Wars stormtroopers, a metalhead gathering, and even tried to hide it among a myriad of massage tables. Check your attentiveness!
Japanese IQ test
But what kind of IQ test did the Japanese come up with? On the shore there is a man with two sons, a mother with two daughters and a policeman with a criminal. In front of them is a raft on which they need to get to the other side. Try to think about how they can be transported there, taking into account such interesting conditions:
- Only two people can fit on the raft at a time, and it cannot float without people at all.
- Children can only travel on the raft with an adult. But sons cannot remain alone with the girls’ mother, and daughters cannot remain alone with the boys’ father.
- And the criminal cannot be left alone with others without the supervision of a policeman.
Found the answer? If not, watch this interesting test in the video:
Right answers
There can be two correct answers to this puzzle. The first is that the bus goes to the left, since on the other side, invisible to the viewer, there are doors through which passengers get inside. This answer is valid for our roads with right-hand traffic. But for countries where traffic is on the left, the correct answer is to the right.
The picture shows parking spaces, and a car occupies one of them. If you turn the picture over, you will realize that you originally saw the numbers upside down. Therefore, the number under the car is 87. No matter how much you try to calculate some clever polynomial here, such interesting puzzles are not designed for algebraic logic, but rather for ingenuity.
Missing value = 2. To solve such children's puzzles, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the children. Do kids know how to solve complex equations and count arithmetic progressions? But they notice that the values in the columns depend on the number of circles in each set of numbers. Let's take, for example, the row 6855: in the number 6 there is one circle, and in the number 8 there are two, so the output is 1+2 =3, that is, 6855=3. And in row 2581 only the number 8 has two circles, so the solution is 2.
There are 12 points in total in the figure. But our brain is designed in such a way that it does not allow us to see them all at the same time, so at a time we can only notice three or four black dots.
The mugs are exactly the same! Such simple puzzles are built on visual illusion. The blue circles on the left side of the picture are large and some distance from the yellow one. The circles on the right side are small and stand close to the yellow circle, which is why it seems to us that it is larger than the first one.
Here's how to solve interesting children's puzzles with matches:
Unmasking the panda:
There are many different puzzles and types. Of course, it’s impossible to talk about all of them, so it’s worth mentioning only the most popular ones.
Mechanical puzzles
Mechanical puzzles- these are puzzles in the form of some kind of devices. For example, , Rubik's Snake etc. They are popular due to their accessibility for the population who do not have access to the Internet, as well as among children and their parents.
Crossword
Crossword(English crossword - intersection of words) or crossword is the most common game with words in the world. There are many periodicals specializing in crossword puzzles, they are also often published in non-specialized print media.
Rebus
Rebus(Latin rebus - with the help of things; instrumental case plural from res - thing) - a riddle in which the words to be solved are given in the form of pictures in combination with letters and some other signs.
Charade
Charade(French charade - riddle) - a type of riddle.
Charade represents a division of a word into syllables in such a way that each syllable has the meaning of an independent word. After which, as in a riddle, a description of each of these word-syllables is given (for example, fact + cheers = texture). The concept of a syllable in charades does not coincide with the concept of a syllable in phonetics. Syllable in charade only in a particular case may it represent a phonetic syllable, but it may also consist of several phonetic syllables, or may not contain vowels at all.
Syllables in charades can be any part of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, unlike other puzzles. More often charades presented in verse. In this case, the intended word breaks up into “charade syllables.”
(colloquial form of "Rubik's Cube"; originally known as the "Magic Cube") is a mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 (and patented in 1975) by the Hungarian sculptor and architecture teacher Erné Rubik.
The puzzle is a plastic cube made up of 26 smaller cubes that can rotate around axes that are invisible from the outside. Each of the nine squares on each side of the cube is colored one of six colors, usually arranged in pairs opposite each other: white-yellow, blue-green, red-orange. Rotating the sides of the cube allows you to rearrange the colored squares in many different ways.
The player's task is to turn the sides of the cube to return it to a state where each face consists of squares of the same color (“collect »).
is a popular puzzle invented in 1878 by Noah Chapman. It is a set of identical square dominoes with numbers printed on them, enclosed in a square box. The length of the side of the box is four times the length of the side of the dominoes for a set of 15 elements (and three times longer for a set of 8 elements), respectively, one square field in the box is left unfilled.
The goal of the game is to move the dominoes around the box to arrange them by number, preferably making as few moves as possible.
Sudoku
Sudoku is a number puzzle game that has become very popular lately. Translated from Japanese, “su” means “number” and “doku” means “standing alone.” Sometimes sudoku is called a “magic square”, which is generally not true, since sudoku is a Latin square of order 9. Sudoku actively publish newspapers and magazines from around the world, collections sudoku published in large editions. Solution sudoku- a popular form of leisure.
The playing field is a 9x9 square, divided into smaller squares with a side of 3 cells. Thus, the entire playing field consists of 81 cells. Already at the beginning of the game, they contain some numbers (from 1 to 9), since an empty playing field does not make sense, because then the task will not be given. Depending on how many cells are already filled, the specific sudoku can be classified as easy or difficult.
Example sudoku written in JavaScript, you can see on the Sudoku page.
Logical paradoxes
Paradox- a situation (statement, statement, judgment or conclusion) that may exist in reality, but has no logical explanation. It is necessary to distinguish paradox And aporia. Aporia, Unlike paradox, is a fictitious, logically true situation (statement, statement, judgment or conclusion) that cannot exist in reality.
Also paradox- a statement that diverges from generally accepted opinion and seems illogical (often only with a superficial understanding). Paradox, unlike an aphorism, is surprising. For example, Wilde’s “Divorces are made in heaven.”
Paradox- this is always a half-truth and this, as Oscar Wilde said, “is the best we can achieve, because absolute truths do not exist.” Paradox its stylized form resembles an aphorism. IN paradox the usual truth collapses before our eyes and is even ridiculed. For example, “I have heard so much slander against you that I have no doubt: you are a wonderful person!” (O. Wilde), “Mutual misunderstanding is the most suitable basis for marriage” (O. Wilde).
The Rubik's Cube has been the most popular toy in the world almost since its inception. Inspired by it, many come up with various original puzzles, and the most interesting of them can go into mass production. In recent years, the market for mechanical puzzles has grown to enormous proportions, so we decided to create a small guide for those who are interested in this segment, but do not know where to start.
What types of puzzles are there?
First of all, it’s worth understanding some simple terminology to understand how some products differ from others:
Shapemod is a modification of a cube based on changing the shape of external parts. At the same time, the assembly principle remains almost unchanged, but due to the unusual design it becomes much more difficult to do.
Bandage puzzles are distinguished by the fact that when moving they can block some edges, creating significant difficulties for the one who solves them.
Of great interest to collectors are puzzles that can change shape when disassembled. This ability allows them to take on a bizarre appearance, confusing the owner.
The strangest puzzles
Perhaps the most popular shapemod of the 3x3 cube, which has long become a classic. This disproportionate cube always attracts people's attention and impresses with its simple and futuristic appearance. And the relatively low price makes it accessible to a wide range of society.
Another famous shapemod, which is interesting for its deceptive appearance. From a distance it can be easily confused with a pyramid, but in fact, inside this amazing puzzle there is an ordinary three-ruble note hidden. With the exception of a few unusual situations, the Mastermorphix is assembled in the same way as its cubic counterpart.
The last shapemod in our top is deservedly Axis Cube. Despite its intricate and intimidating appearance, its design is also based on a standard 3x3 cube. The main feature of the puzzle is that when disassembled it completely loses its shape, making solving it a truly exciting experience.
This product stands out from the rest due to its versatility. The cube comes with a variety of lids that allow you to combine elements to create different bandage puzzles with unique assembly principles.
These puzzles surprise many with their intricate design, but in reality they are not as difficult to assemble as they seem. The number of different versions of the toy testifies to its success: in the company’s assortment you will find almost all regular polyhedra, including cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and even icosahedron. Each edge has a certain number of points around which parts can rotate.
A real record holder who will not leave anyone indifferent. Instead of coming up with something radically new, the MF8 company decided to take the Megaminx we are used to and increase it to incredible sizes.
This cuboid is very similar to the 3x3, but consists of as many as nine layers, making it one of the largest on the market. A distinctive feature is its thoughtful design, which allows it to be assembled without much effort. It is also worth mentioning many other interesting and high-quality cuboids produced by VitEden.
Shapemod of a unique puzzle from the VitEden company called Mixap 3x3. Such an octahedron can rotate like an ordinary three-pointer, but if you don’t turn the middle face too far, its amazing ability to swap edges and centers is immediately revealed. In this state, the puzzle quickly loses its shape, so it can occupy its owner for a long time.
Geranium Plus deservedly takes second place on the list. This flat puzzle is one of the most complex in the world and consists of many different pieces moving along internal circles. After the first movements it can easily confuse you, so it is perfect for testing your abilities.
This puzzle was based on a classic 3x3 cube, but additional axes of rotation were added on each side, making the principle of its solution radically new and unusual. This toy attracts many lovers of challenging tasks with its spectacular appearance and will become a real challenge for those who decide to assemble it themselves.
Of course, most of the interesting puzzles did not fit into this list, so you can always visit our catalog and find something that you especially like.
